stand by me and prop me up, like a good wife, or I may fall flat at his feet.”
“Am I your true lady?” demanded Aline, like all women wanting guarantees before witnesses.
“Surely! Too late to think better of it now, my heart!”
She was beside him, clasped firmly in his arm, when he came before the king. “Your Grace,” said Hugh, condescending out of some exalted private place scarcely flawed by weariness and wounds, “I trust I have proven my case against a murderer, and have your Grace’s countenance and approval.”
“Your opponent,” said Stephen, “proved your case for you, all too well.” He eyed them thoughtfully, disarmed and diverted by this unexpected apparition of entwined lovers. “But what you have proved may also be your gain. You have robbed me, young man, of an able deputy sheriff of this shire, whatever else he may have been, and however foul a fighter. I may well take reprisal by drafting you into the vacancy you’ve created. Without prejudice to your own castles and your rights of garrison on our behalf. What do you say?”
“With your Grace’s leave,” said Beringar, straight-faced, “I must first take counsel with my bride.”
“Whatever is pleasing to my lord,” said Aline, equally demurely, “is also pleasing to me.”
Well, well, though Brother Cadfael, looking on with interest, I doubt if troth was ever plighted more publicly. They had better invite the whole of Shrewsbury to the wedding.
Brother Cadfael walked across to the guest hall before Compline, and took with him not only a pot of his goose-grass salve for Hugh Beringar’s numerous minor grazes, but also Giles Siward’s dagger, with its topaz finial carefully restored.
“Brother Oswald is a skilled silversmith, this is his gift and mine to your lady. Give it to her yourself. But ask her — as I know she will — to deal generously by the boy who fished it out of the river. So much you will have to tell her. For the rest, for her brother’s part, yes, silence, now and always. For her he was only one of the many who chose the unlucky side, and died for it.”
Beringar took the repaired dagger in his hand, and booked at it long and somberly. “Yet this is not justice,” he said slowly. “You and I between us have forced into the light the truth of one man’s sins, and covered up the truth of another’s.” This night, for all his gains, he was very grave and a little sad, and not only because all his wounds were stiffening, and all his misused muscles groaning at every movement. The recoil from triumph had him fixing honest eyes on the countenance of failure, the fate he had escaped. “Is justice due only to the blameless? If he had not been so visited and tempted, he might never have found himself mired to the neck in so much infamy.”
“We deal with what is,” said Cadfael. “Leave what might have been to eyes that can see it plain. You take what’s lawfully and honourably won, and value and enjoy
it. You have that right. Here are you, deputy sheriff of Salop, in royal favour, affianced to as fine a girl as heart could wish, and, the one you set your mind on from the moment you saw her. Be sure I noticed! And if you’re stiff and sore’ in every bone tomorrow — and, lad, you will be! — what’s a little disciplinary pain to a young man in your high feather?”
“I wonder,” said Hugh, brightening, “where the other two are by now.”
“Within reach of the Welsh coast, waiting for a ship to carry them coastwise round to France. They’ll do well enough.” As between Stephen and Maud, Cadfael felt no allegiance; but these young creatures, though two of them held for Maud and two for Stephen, surely belonged to a future and an England delivered from the wounds of civil war, beyond this present anarchy.
“As for justice,” said Brother Cadfael thoughtfully, “it is but half the tale.” He would say a prayer at Compline for the repose of Nicholas Faintree, a clean young man of mind and life, surely now assuaged and at rest. But he would also say a prayer for the soul of Adam Courcelle, dead in his guilt; for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many. “No need,” said Cadfael, “for you ever to look over your shoulder, or feel any compunction. You did the work that fell to you, and did it well. God disposes all. From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man’s scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace.”
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Qvadis
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www.qvadis.com
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